Forced labor in China – Investigating factory-like prisons | DW Documentary

Forced labor in China – Investigating factory-like prisons | DW Documentary

Dear Anonymous, I am a French journalist and filmmaker. Let me tell you how we discovered your story. It’s thanks to two women, two friends. Without them, your voice might never have reached us. It was 2015 in Paris. One of them had planned on taking a pregnancy test. They will never forget that day. Take the one that’s cheapest. What is that? SOS… Chinese, right? SOS… The two of them entrusted me with your letter, your cry for help. You wrote it in prison in the Chinese city of Tianjin. Anonymously, to protect yourself. Your testimony offers a rare insight into Chinese prisons and shows us that forced labor on a grand scale does not affect the Uyghurs alone. Risking your life, you write: “Dear friends, are you aware that while you live your quiet lives, Chinese prisoners in Tianjin work 12 to 15 hours a day?” In here we go hungry. We get only five to six hours sleep a day. People with different political opinions can be charged as criminals. In managing the prisoners, the police collude with cell bosses. In the minds of the officers, they are using evil to control evil and violence to control violence. I wanted to sign this letter. But then my life would be in danger. It would be good if I could die quickly. This handwriting should never be published in China. Because they will go to all lengths to find out which person wrote this. They will kill him. They will kill him. You finish with the words: “Dear friends, thank you for your compassion and sympathy. Please help me. Thank you very much.” Signed from the prison in Tianjin, China. …Are you still alive? … As you requested, we have alerted the public. I have traveled thousands of kilometers with your letter and met with former prisoners to understand your story and your connection to us. This report is a response to your words, which must not go unheard. The first witness I met was imprisoned in 2014. Like all prisoners in China, he suffered from inhumane prison conditions and had to do forced labor. Wow, unbelievable… When a convict first arrives in a prison, the police tell you clearly that, strictly speaking, you are no longer a human. It’s heartbreaking to read this letter. Because, having had that experience, I can see it in my own eyes. I can see those moments of despair. This footage shows Marius Balo’s return to Romania, after eight years in prison in China. His country campaigned tirelessly for his release. Marius was convicted of fraudulent business practices in 2014, even though he is an English teacher. He has always denied the accusations. I was there exactly eight years. And if you break it down into days – it comes down to 2,922 days. So, I came up with this idea that, once I get back, I’ll go on a pilgrimage. I’ll walk one kilometer for each day I spent there. This is the main point of my pilgrimage – that people find out what China really is. What they’re doing to their own people. What they’re doing to the foreigners. How they behave in prison, with prisoners. The forced labor, the tortures. The killings that are being perpetrated there every single day. I met Peter Humphrey, who had put me in contact with Marius, in a London suburb. Both men had been sent to the same prison in Shanghai. Peter had been working in China on behalf of Western companies and was supposed to carefully check the reliability of their partners on site. This is known as due diligence. During his investigations, Peter became too curious about a member of the Chinese Communist Party. The reaction was not long in coming. Peter and his wife were arrested. The trial and their forced confession were broadcast on television. The couple were sentenced to two years in prison and released in 2015. Like you, dear Anonymous, Peter has experienced prison first-hand. I was taken to a detention center and thrown into a cell in the middle of the night, at 3 a.m. in the morning. With twelve prisoners sleeping on the floor of the cell and bright light. It was a tremendous shock, a trauma. And to this very day I often have a flashback of that particular moment, when I arrived in the cell. Because it was absolute horror. A pregnancy test. And it contains some documentation. And then here we have – I don’t think this is supposed to be here – so this is a handwritten letter. It is a plea to the world. From a prisoner in China Tianjin prison. I can see it’s genuine. I know that in Tianjin there are about 10 or 12 prisons. All of the other prisons in Tianjin have more complicated names, named after the districts where those prisons are located. So I am pretty certain that this is the Tianjin Municipal Prison that he is referring to. Thanks to Peter, I have my first clue as to where in Tianjin your prison is located. Tianjin is in north-eastern China, around 130 kilometers from Beijing. The city has more than 10 million inhabitants and is known for its pharmaceutical industry and its huge port, which facilitates global trade. Eleven prisons are said to be located here. It’s unclear exactly how many prisons there are across the country. Many are kept secret. We drove to Tianjin. The city prison was once a well-known building in the city center. But only a watchtower and the outer walls remain. The prison was demolished, and a hospital was built in its place. A memorial plaque indicates that the prison was moved to another location. The new address is not listed in any register. Finding you, dear Anonymous, was proving more difficult than we had thought. I remember that. I remember that for sure. What you see here, this square are the bounds of the prison. These are the administration offices in front. The security area is this. More than half of this entire area here are factories. In this tiny little area here are the housing units. From Monday to Saturday, there were truck after truck coming in, going into the factory area here and truck after truck going out. Sort of like a highway, We were joking with each other. Because, being housed here we could see all these trucks going out all the time. There were lines. I was extremely disappointed to see, for years, that most of the work that we would get there were Western companies. You know what Marius is talking about. In your letter you tell us that the police work hand in hand with the prison system. You write about the labor camps, the Laogai. The term means “reform through work and re-education". The camps were set up at the beginning of the People’s Republic and had two goals: Brainwashing and forced labor. Introduced under Mao Zedong, the Laogai were intended to silence anyone who was a thorn in the side of the regime. Millions of men and women lost their lives as slave laborers in mines, quarries and farms. 70 years later, you, dear Anonymous, are proof that these camps still exist. And this even though the Laogai were officially abolished in 2013. Tienchi Martin-Liao was a member of the Laogai Research Foundation, the first US-based NGO to fight the Laogai system. As an employee of the Laogai Research Foundation, she collected the statements of former prisoners like you, dear Anonymous, and published them. She knows your story well. In the ten years where I worked there, we published over 30 books. We collected lots of materials about the prison system. In the eyes of the police, prisoners are mere work tools and money-making machines. Whenever prisoners make mistakes, apart from beatings and cursing, officers punish the prisoners with electric batons to give out electric shocks. And they even stun them with electric batons when they don’t work hard enough. I think it’s really very realistic. In the prison law it is said it is not allowed to use torture. But it’s just on the paper, in the reality, the prison officers use all kinds of torture. And here they mentioned the electric baton. I know there is one book here that it is said that they use the electric baton to hit you and sometimes if they are really angry with one prisoner, they put the electric baton in your mouth, so you lose all your teeth. Dima – as he calls himself – makes no secret of his criminal past. In 2019, he was arrested in Shanghai for credit card fraud and sentenced to two years in prison. He was in the same prison as Marius and Peter where he refused to do any forced labor. Dima paid dearly for this. They have a special kind of torture, you know. When they tie you, they have a special table, with special belts. Not like you see in a movie, for crazy people. It’s stronger. You lay on this special table, and they tied you totally, here, here, here, your hands, your legs, everything. And you’re tied like this, without any movement. And I laid like this three days. I refused to take food, because it was impossible to take food, they feed you. And I refused to eat. They said “Why do you refuse to eat?”, I said because I cannot use the toilet. This is why I refused to eat, because who wants to be humiliated? Can you imagine if they treat me like this what they can do with Chinese? This I’m talking about. This European businessman has not forgotten his experiences either. By now, he has built a new life for himself in Bangkok. Back in 2011, he was convicted of commercial fraud and spent eight years in Chinese prisons. Like you, dear Anonymous, he won’t reveal his name. He may be free … but he is still afraid. That brings back memories. So all of that is true. People with different political opinions can be charged as criminals. That could indicate that he is against the system. But, most people, wealthy people, most people in China are against the system. But they are too frightened to say. He was subjected to forced labor for eight years. He describes the production process in prison through the eyes of a businessman. You were never really building something from the start to the finish. Each job kind of lasted a minimum of one month. And then, once it was finished, they’d either continue with that or bring something new. I think the longest was the tags, the clothes tags for companies like C&A. There’s a lot of screening that they need to do before, with companies. So you’ll have the front company and then below that you’ll have an agent, so you’ll have the middleman kind of thing, that’s liaising between the foreign company, the screening company and then the prison. So it is very complicated. If you’ve got ten companies giving you, let’s say, or are willing to offer you, one dollar per unit, and all of a sudden you’ve got another one saying, we’ll do it for 50, then you’re not going to investigate. The Serenity Test 0 is one of the cheapest pregnancy tests on the market, sold by almost 8,000 pharmacies in France and in 30 countries worldwide. The company name on the packaging is BCT System Company Limited. The test can be found on the official corporate website. The company distributes all types of tests worldwide, including COVID tests. BCT’s official address is in Shenzhen, but the packaging in which you have hidden your letter only says Tianjin. The two cities are over 1,800 kilometers apart. Finding you is like looking for a needle in a haystack. The BCT website lists former Health Minister Xinzhong as the company patron. He was the official who introduced China’s one-child policy in the 1980s and ensured that millions of women were sterilized or forced to have abortions. He is the only politician named on the website — despite being dead over ten years. I don’t feel it’s surprising that a former minister will be somebody who is running a prison laboring enterprise. Because any business in China, it only exists by the grace of the political power. So obviously an ex-minister will have a close association with political power. Money really means nothing in China. Political power trumps everything else. My name is Desmond Shum. I have had a complicated life. Born in Shanghai, grew up in Hong Kong, educated in the United States, and I spent 20 years in Beijing doing investment and real estate development. We are very closely associated with the premier Wen Jiabao’s family. We are their business partner essentially. Xi Jinping is less friendly towards the private sector than his predecessors. He sees it as potential opposition. Under the pretext of fighting corruption, officials are stepping up imprisoning and doing away with Chinese entrepreneurs. Even Westerners are no longer spared. Xi Jinping has rolled back policies introduced by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s. Deng Xiaoping famously said getting wealthy is glorious. So for a long time, and even today, for a lot of people in China, any way to get wealthy is glorious. And so I use my association and closeness to political power for personal profiteering. And then in this case, some people have a close association with the prison system of China and then they use it for their personal profiteering. Laogai survivors can be found all over the world. Chen Pokong fled to the US in 1993 and was the first to expose the Laogai’s work for foreign companies. As the leader of the democracy movement in Shanghai, Chen Pokong was sent to prison and wrote a letter from there. A cry for help. Like you, dear Anonymous, he denounced forced labor, hunger and torture. Thanks to an NGO, his message reached the United States. I was proud of myself to be the first one to expose the crime. We were forced to make artificial flowers. The blood stained the artificial flowers. China. Guangzhou. This is the place. I was spending there more than one and a half years. We had to do two things. Daytime, we moved stones to the boat, cargo, so the boat and the cargo moved away. And in the evening, we’d do artificial flowers. For at least six hours. Now they’ve put some machines here. Before, I didn’t see these machines. Maybe after some years, they changed something. This looks like same. I almost lost my life. I survived. But some people lost their life in the laboring process. The stone would fall down and someone died. Or someone beat to death. I didn’t lose my life. I survived. However, I found out about the products for export. I was angry. Not only sad, I was angry. I was determined to expose it. To tell the international community what we are doing and what they are enjoying for the products. Chen Pokong is a fascinating figure who helped me a lot in my investigation. He helped explain to me what life was like in the camps. The conditions are very similar to what we’re hearing about today, and this just shows how long this has been happening. With the support of Chen Pokong, Amelia Pang published a book about forced labor in China in 2019. She went undercover in China, posing as a businesswoman and establishing contact with several prison companies. Because my family speaks Chinese I went to the site and pretended to be working with the manufacturer and wanting to source from these facilities. So, I would talk to the guards and say “hey, I would like to buy products from you, I work with a major global supplier”, and they said “Yes, great, we sell a lot of products here, please, you’re welcome to take a look.” While there’s no hard numbers because the Chinese government doesn’t release reliable statistics, we believe it’s in the millions. The people who land at these labor camps are largely political dissidents, pro-democracy activists, religious dissidents or sometimes human rights lawyers. Sorry, let me just have more coffee. I decided to follow the trucks that left these labor camps to see which supplier they worked with. What struck me was the diversity of the products that they made. These camps make a very wide range of products from artificial flowers that we may or may not need to buy, to even pharmaceutical products that we do need in our lives. When I followed these trucks I found that they were working with… they were producing products that were being sold for major global brands, like Apple, Amazon, and I think if I can show these direct connections, then these brands have more resources than a single journalist does and they can too. What’s striking to me about this letter is that a pregnancy test is supposed to symbolize the beginning of life. A new life. And here it was manufactured by someone who is in between life and death, just barely holding on. And they’re begging for a new life as well. A chance to live. Yeah, that’s terrible. I can make three basic judgements. Number one, this person was educated. As in he went to college – number one. Number two, this is a political prisoner, because he said he even has a different opinion. A dissident can be treated as a criminal. Third, I can say maybe two-thirds possibility it’s a man but one third possibility it’s a woman. It could be a woman. This handwriting. I’m very touched by this letter. All my memory came back to me. 30 years ago, when I was in jail. In camps, in detention centers. I cannot imagine how, after 30 years, Chinese people are still suffering like this. Even worse. Dear Anonymous, I was able to send your letter to a political prisoner who was recently released from a prison in Tianjin. This brave man still lives in China, and on reading your letter he gave us further insight into the prison conditions there. Your letter gives me the impression that the prisoner works in one of the last links in the chain of the pharmaceutical industry, like packaging. There are many such factories in Tianjin. In the prison where I was, we had to pack disposable gloves for export to Europe. This seemingly easy work is extremely laborious. As soon as a prisoner enters the prison, he becomes a kind of robot. In fact, there are two types of robots – soldiers and prisoners. Each prisoner is just a small link in a complex production chain. They’re expected to behave like machines, working at high speed. Every day, from morning to night, almost non-stop. Masks, gloves, tests – packaged up in prison. I followed the trail of these products from Tianjin and came across the website of a Chinese wholesaler showing the connection between BCT System in Shenzhen and Tianjin. It’s a company called Recare. One of the products this Tianjin-based company manufactures is the Serenity Test. According to its own documentation, it uses BCT’s patents. Twenty-four US cents per piece. That’s the price for which prisoners work themselves to death. In its many promotional videos, Recare promises unbeatable prices and delivery times. On the company’s website, pictures of the production hall and sales department are shown in an endless loop. Recare’s address is in Tianjin. We wanted to verify that. We went to building number thirteen-dash-three. There’s no sign and no logo. It’s a residential area. There could be offices behind this door, but there’s nothing to suggest that. There’s no production facility here, another indication that the test was packaged in prison. It’s another clue this product came from the Laogai. Dear Anonymous, your story is also the story of trade relations between our countries, one full of contradictions. One the one hand, there’s the EU Parliament offering strong support for the Uyghurs. On the other, there’s the EU Commission negotiating an investment agreement with China, which has not yet been ratified. It’s a double game, according to Reinhard Bütikofer, Chair of the Delegation for Relations with the People’s Republic of China. A former Australian prime minister was asked what has been motivating Australia’s China policy. And he said two words. Greed and fear. I don’t think that in the European case fear has played such a prominent role. But greed, obviously has. The letter reminds us that it is not sufficient just to talk about the fate of the Tibetans or the Uyghurs, or the Hui or the Mongols. We have to address a system that is built on the basis of disrespect for the most fundamental human rights. Since 2021, the US has been trying to put trade with China on an ethical footing. The two countries are engaged in an open trade war. A law passed by Congress aims to prevent goods produced with forced labor in Xinjiang, the province of the Uyghurs, from reaching North America. We want the Uyghurs and all repressed people in China to know, that we do care about them. We fight forced labor and we send Beijing a clear message: this genocide must end now. When China joined the WTO 20 years ago this week, the world gave Beijing a blank check. And today’s legislation will help right this wrong. Raphaël Glucksmann was one of the first to stand up for the rights of the Uyghurs. He is working on EU draft legislation – based on existing American laws – for all products made with forced labor. We need a simple trade instrument to ban products from the European market that originate from slavery or forced labor. As soon as a product is associated with forced labor, it’s banned from the European market. It’s not even a law. It’s a trade instrument. That’s what we want to introduce. As soon as someone finds a letter like this, they should alert the authorities, who should pass the message on to the customs office in the country. This way, all shipments containing these tests can be confiscated by customs. Why do we want such an instrument? Because we want to make sure we don’t support criminal activity by buying such products. Slavery will only exist if it’s financially profitable. If we support this system through our consumption, we’re partly responsible for the existence of forced labor. Dear Anonymous, I have been searching for your prison for months. By comparing conversations with relatives on Chinese social networks and satellite images, I finally find the coordinates of the prison. What I see is shocking: a huge prison complex, comprising at least three prisons. Officially, there are five state-owned companies attached to it. The complex is partially surrounded by water. It’s a fortress from which there’s no escape. You have an entrance here with a couple of entrance buildings. And those buildings will typically be the administration buildings of the prison. So, these buildings and these buildings look to me like cell blocks. Every floor of every cell block would have… let’s call it a factory room, where they would have manufacturing labor. That was the same in my prison in Shanghai. It was the same in my wife’s prison in Shanghai, and it’s the same in most prisons where the production labor is working on rather low levels for products. Like packaging or very small-scale manual assembly of things. A prison like this could be holding a couple of thousand prisoners. This is the first time that I’ve seen what seem to be so many prison campuses clustered together in one neighborhood. It’s very clear to me that China’s prison system has grown exponentially, especially in the last ten years, but even before that. One of the first things that Xi Jinping said when he came to power, he spoke to his subordinates and said “build more prisons”. And that’s what he’s been doing. Security is much higher, the scale is bigger and the level of commercial economic activity bringing profits to the prisons has expanded exponentially. We now know where you are being held and want to see the huge prison complex for ourselves. We drive to the south of Liyuantou in the district of Xiqing. We know we run a great risk of being arrested, but we drive on towards the prison … your prison. The security measures at the main entrance are strict. We can’t stay there for long. The prison walls stretch for several kilometers. It looks even more expansive than on the satellite image. We have never been as close to you as we are now. If you are still imprisoned, if you are still alive at all. I am a business fraud investigator. My clients ask me to do things like checking on a potential business partner, identifying the people behind it, their background and their history. To ensure that the risk of fraud is minimized. I was happy to help because I am interested in the welfare of Chinese workers, Chinese prisoners and the wider population. It’s being treated terribly by a regime that these people do not deserve. Dear Anonymous, hopefully one day you will learn that this man’s help was crucial. After 20 years of working in China, he emigrated to Ireland because he no longer felt safe. He agreed to meet with me in Dublin. Your story touched him, and he is looking for the Chinese subcontractor who is exploiting you. He is working in secret, supported by contacts in China. He showed us two very detailed reports with evidence of links between the Recare company and forced labor in your prison. There are good grounds for suspecting fraud. None of the addresses associated with Recare in the commercial register and other official sources are industrial sites. They are just offices. The names of prison employees are kept secret in China. But the investigator found out that a manager of the city prison and a commercial manager of Recare are one and the same person. In an old Tianjin business directory, the contact person for Recare is the same name as a female official of the city prison. Her name, position and cell phone number are on a list of prison officials compiled by an independent source. Our final leg takes us from one port to another, from Tianjin to Marseille, home to a company called Ageti. The company has been having the Serenity pregnancy test manufactured in China for over 15 years. Your letter, dear Anonymous, passed through this warehouse at some point and has now made its way back here. I speak no Chinese, but we have this letter here. It says SOS on the back. You have also sent me a translation of this document. I would like to point out that this is a medical product. It must not be produced in a prison. That is strictly forbidden. It must come from a medical device factory. But certain manual tasks can be and are carried out in prisons. Like what? The final packaging. The test is produced in the factory. However, packaging can take place outside the factory. That is possible. I cannot carry out an investigation in this case. The whole process is too complex. But it is possible with the packaging. Yes. The fact that products are packaged in a prison doesn’t shock me. But that prisoners work 15 hours a day without anything to eat, without pay, that shocks me. What can we do about it? I will carry out a more thorough investigation. But we can only produce these products in Asia. Otherwise, the price consumers pay would be three or four times higher. In other words: the price justifies everything. One day, companies will have to react, review their supply chains abroad and commit to respecting human rights. This is what the Supply Chain Act is all about. Members of the European Parliament have two days to debate and vote on the legislative text. Your letter, dear Anonymous, could play a role in how things turn out. We start with the Committee on Foreign Affairs and a speech by Raphaël Glucksmann. Dear colleagues, this letter was found in the box of this pregnancy test. A cry for help from a Chinese prisoner who is forced to manufacture products that are then sold in Paris. This is what a world without rules leads to, where those who have the most power bear the least responsibility. Due diligence legislation is a major revolution. Weakening or rejecting it is contrary to our principles and interests. Everyone will have to answer for their vote. Amendment eight, who is in favor? Who is against? Who abstains? Adopted. 20 years after China joined the WTO, Europe and the US are finally trying to put an end to something that may have cost you, dear Anonymous, your life, or at least robbed you of part of it. The vote is closed. Accepted. This vote is a first, historic step. We can only hope Europe will take the next one: a trade ban on all products made by forced labor, not just from Xinjiang. Looks like they made it. We made it. Yeah. 30 years lie between your call for help, dear Anonymous, and that of Chen Pokong. 30 years in which a handful of women and men like you risked their lives to denounce the Chinese prison system. I hope one day you will find out that your courageous efforts were not in vain.

The film provides insights into China‘s factory-like prisons. The tip-off comes from a pregnancy test bought in a Parisian pharmacy. It contains a letter, smuggled into the package, from a political prisoner who reports on forced labor in prison.

What does a pregnancy test have to do with a Chinese prison? Not much, at first glance. However, filmmaker Laetitia Moreau found a handwritten letter from a political prisoner next to the package insert of the pregnancy test purchased in a Paris pharmacy. The letter describes the forced labor he was doing in the prison where the test was manufactured. The letter begins like this: “Dear friends, do you know that Chinese prisoners in Tianjin have to work 12 to 15 hours a day and don’t even get a meal in return so that you can have a comfortable life?” He concludes with the words: “Please help me.”
The letter is rare testimony to the fact that in China it is not only the Uyghurs who are subject to forced labor. Prisoners are exploited by subcontractors working for both Chinese and foreign companies. They are beaten and tortured. In Mao’s time, there were re-education camps for dissidents, but the current government is pursuing other goals: It is striving for economic supremacy and has introduced slave labor into the country’s prisons to help achieve this.
When Laetitia Moreau received the letter in question, she set off to China to meet with former prisoners. Recently released, the former inmates talk about the hell they lived through and describe the mechanisms of the system. Finally, Moreau makes her way to the huge prison complex where the letter was written.

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